eBay Partner Network Affiliate Quality Click Pricing Concerns

The eBay Partner Network has introduced Quality Click Pricing, a new quality-based Cost Per Click (CPC) payout model designed to better reward top affiliates, simplify the commission structure, and increase the quality of traffic driven to eBay sites through the affiliate program.

As we all know, there were thousands and thousands of people (affiliates) promoting eBay products. Most of which had junk sites meaning no real content and the quality of their web sites traffic was blatantly poor. eBay’s Quality Pricing structure will penalize those types of sites.

In the past, earnings were based on sales and new active confirmed registered users (ACRU). So, affiliates were paid on a final sale basis and for those new users who signed up to eBay. At a minimum, ACRU’s were about $25. This was very nice. Now earnings are base on the new Earnings Per Click system (EPC).

What’s Quality Click Pricing?

Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic.

As you can see now you will need to change how your website attracts traffic. Quality of traffic and the expected long-term eBay customer is what eBay is now looking for, not just the quantity. So for example, don’t just build a website with very little content and is almost no value to the visitor. Instead build your website with a theme or niche, add content that your visitors would like to read and then display the relevant eBay products.
Even though I made great profits under the old eBay payout structure, the new Quality Pricing Structure (although started out dismal) is showing some promises.